Tomorrow has come, Mr Atwoli, and Sifuna wants to be president

Bright chaps that recited poetry in primary school back in the 1980s will remember Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘Father William’.

It begins: “You are old, Father William,” the young man said, “And your hair has become very white; And yet you incessantly stand on your head—Do you think, at your age, it is right?”

For purely political reasons, Carroll’s poem would be a perfect retort to Francis Atwoli, a veteran trade unionist of no mean repute, and anyone else who feels that Edwin Sifuna cannot become the next President of the Republic of Kenya because he is ‘too young’.

Indeed, Mr Sifuna easily represents the young man in Carroll’s poem, wondering why his old father will not admit that he is getting too old to stand on his head, perform somersaults or chew a goose with its bones and beak.

In a society like ours, where a good number of parental figures are hardly worth emulating, telling our children to obey their parents would be risking too much.

Perhaps Atwoli does not realise that he is stirring the deceptively calm waters of Gen Z, a generation that has demonstrated its ability to take over the streets when provoked. If he wants an intergenerational war on his hands, then he shall have it on Tuesday, August 10, 2027.

By then, it might be too late to realise that picking a fight with a generation eager to challenge the old order was a bad idea.

Atwoli and his ilk need to wake up and smell the coffee. The little boys and girls they condescending asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” have since grown up. Those who said they wanted to be president are now at the door, knocking—nay, banging—and declaring: “I am grown up, and I still want to be president!”

For decades, as Chinua Achebe suggests, the old guard has locked itself inside the hut it inherited after independence, telling those outside that it is trying to expand it to accommodate everyone. Perhaps the panic we sense inside the hut comes from the realisation that the crowd waiting outside is now largely composed of the very people we have always lied to, telling them to wait their turn to become tomorrow’s leaders.

Sifuna represents this impatient generation that we have kept deceiving, hoping tomorrow would never come. Well, tomorrow, as a deadline, expired yesterday. Having promised young people that they would lead tomorrow, what lie shall we tell them now? That they are poor, even though we are partly to blame for their poverty? That they are too young, even when they have children of their own?

One wonders why a generation that taught its young people to prepare for leadership suddenly wishes that tomorrow would never come. Perhaps the old guard fears that its questionable political morality will be exposed to its children, along with the origins of some of its accumulated power and wealth.

But perhaps they are right. Maybe Sifuna does not know much about the presidency. He does not speak, act or dress like a president. But there is no school of the presidency in Kenya that we know of. And if there were one, the conduct of some of its graduates would be reason enough to shut it down.

What we see from the old guard gives us every reason to avoid its school of leadership: A school that insists grey hair is a sign of wisdom, even as things go wrong under the watch of those we trusted because of their age; a school that has, for decades, preached water to its children while drinking barrels of wine.

Back to Carroll’s Father William, the young man asks why his father continues to stand on his head at his age. His father responds:

“In my youth, I feared it might injure the brain; but now that I’m perfectly sure I have none, why, I do it again and again.”

Perhaps that is the problem with some of the old guard in our politics: Trying to stand on its head for too long.

Mr Muchiri is a media and public communications consultant.